Nickle is a programming language based prototyping environment with powerful programming and scripting capabilities. Nickle supports a variety of datatypes, especially arbitrary precision numbers. The programming language vaguely resembles C. Some things in C which do not translate easily are different, some design choices have been made differently, and a very few features are simply missing. Nickle provides the functionality of Unix bc, dc, and expr in much-improved form. It is also an ideal environment for prototyping complex algorithms. Nickle's scripting capabilities make it a nice replacement for spreadsheets in some applications, and its numeric features nicely complement the limited numeric functionality of text-oriented languages such as AWK and Perl. WWW: http://www.nickle.org/